The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 200-151

The script called for Nick Cave to settle into mellow middle age, but the singer clearly would have none of it. Whether it was the departure of longtime potentiator Blixa Bargeld or merely the singer approaching 50, something reignited a fire under Cave and his protean partners the Bad Seeds in the mid-2000s that smolders to this day. But even taking into account the subsequent highs of Grinderman and Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! the epic Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus remains Cave's top work this decade. After all, it was on this double-disc opus that Cave not only reinvigorated his already vicious and virile fire and brimstone bluster with equal parts gospel and grunge, but nudged a little bit more humor to the fore as well. Indeed, if the highlights of this collection are too numerous to single out, Cave must take particular satisfaction in rhyming "Orpheus" with "orifice" in the most lewd manner possible. --Joshua Klein

179. Camera ObscuraLet's Get Out of This Country
[Merge; 2006]

Whether by proxy, presentation, or straight-up patronage, Camera Obscura's lace-collared pop seemed doomed to be eclipsed by Belle and Sebastian comparisons. Though valid, 2006's Let's Get Out of This Country captured a band getting out from underneath a hefty legacy the best way any group can: great songs. Front to back, this was the Glaswegian sextet's finest set yet, full of golden melodies made all the stickier and more durable by Tracyanne Campbell's new tales of heartache. Showroom strings and wedding organ gave the homerun title track and winners like "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken" and "Come Back Margaret" a schmaltzy pop in which Campbell couldn't have sounded more capable of juicing your pleasure center, whether you needed a laugh or a cry. Every flourish was in its right place. --David Bevan

178. Lil WayneTha Carter II
[Cash Money; 2005]

The first Carter was when Wayne started calling himself the "best rapper alive" straight-faced, but Tha Carter II was when people stopped laughing at that claim. Wayne, once a non-cussing kiddie rapper, had hardened his delivery into an elemental croak, and he'd somehow learned the rare ability to craft punchlines so sticky that they'd bounce around in your head all day. He'd also learned not to show all his cards at once. Instead of just telling us about the gun in his trunk, he let loose with something oblique like this: "Riding by myself, well really not really/ So heavy in the trunk, make the car pop a wheelie." And perhaps most importantly, this was his first album not produced by Mannie Fresh, and he had the good sense to replace Fresh's punchy ADD electro with swampy, primordial thuds that gave his jokes urgency and force. --Tom Breihan

177. BroadcastThe Noise Made By People
[Warp; 2000]

Their first singles ticked off their references-- the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the United States of America, Nico. On this debut Broadcast set about the task of forging them into a world. It's a strange world too, as antique as the Clientele's and as skewed and chilly as the Knife's, its wintry spaces filled with echo and chimes and analogue ghosts. But once you start exploring it you'll find its inhabitants more hospitable than you'd imagined. Singer Trish Keenan can weave spells-- the baffling, lingering "Echo's Answer"-- but she can also be tender, beckoning a shy companion on "Come On Let's Go", chiding a suspicious lover on "Papercuts". Broadcast are at home on creaking synths but they can summon a stiff, fogbound groove when needed-- like the RZA-esque "Dead the Long Year". On later releases Broadcast's confidence and songwriting grew stronger, but they've never sounded quite this bewitching or curious. --Tom Ewing

176. The Mountain GoatsTallahassee
[4AD; 2002]

For a decade, John Darnielle's jackhammer strum and lamb-to-slaughter bleat sketched short, tape-hissy tales of big, big rabbits, orange balls of hate, dysfunction, violence, isolation, and a Google Maps' site worth of geography. In 2002, he changed things up a bit, not only booking an actual studio, but carrying a suitcase of favorite tropes to Florida's panhandle-- home to previous bit players, the alpha couple-- for an entire album length's stay. Good short story writers don't always make good novelists. But Tallahassee is a vivid, fully realized night-sweat of a song cycle in which the breakdown of your average awful marriage (you probably know a few) assumes gothic proportions. "No Children", everyone's favorite mutual-self-destruction sing-along, is unquestionably bleak. But the tracklist abounds with less-celebrated scenes of abject terror and despair, from "The House That Dripped Blood"'s husky chords and open throat of a cellar door, to the delicately lit powder kegs of "International Small Arms Traffic Blues". Schadenfreude (or empathy) rarely sounded this delicious (or depressing). --Amy Granzin

175. Various ArtistsTotal 3
[Kompakt; 2001]

Like most great compilations, this one stands for slightly more than itself. Total 3 felt, from some vantage points, like the moment where Cologne's Kompakt label announced itself to the wider world. From here on out, its elegantly cloudy take on minimal techno and microhouse-- gusty, sparkling ambience yoked to the steady beat of dance music, low on bangers and high on subtleties-- would become a big part of the decade. Of course, Total 3 isn't just on this list as a stand-in; it's here because it's terrific all by itself, because it's a lot of what earned all that attention. Sedate hustles and throbs, dark crawls, colorful funk, the glorious sentimentality of Jürgen Paape's "So Weit Wie Noch Nie"-- this collection can be mesmerizing, and it's beautifully built around a core aesthetic. Thinking of it merely as the dance style that crossed over-- the warm-bath techno that turned the heads of even the techno-skeptical-- does it a disservice; it ignores just how well-formed and flexible and satisfying this stuff can be, no matter whose ear it's catching. --Nitsuh Abebe

174. Okkervil RiverBlack Sheep Boy
[Jagjaguwar; 2005]

Doomed folkie Tim Hardin plays Virgil for Will Sheff, touring the Okkervil River frontman through a rock'n'roll purgatory of bloodthirsty drifters, damaged women, and drug-frayed anthropomorphic metaphors. Less "Behind the Music" than either of the band's excellent follow-ups, The Stage Names or The Stand Ins, Black Sheep Boy is a rock picaresque that's touched with very little of those LP's bone-deep cynicism. It succeeds not merely by Sheff's literate wordplay, dynamically angsty melodies, or even his deep knowledge of a rock-historical footnote, but by the way Okkervil River click together as a band more strongly than they had on previous albums. They serve as both the pit orchestra for Sheff's staged plays and a clever foil for his unhinged performances, like when they nail the stop-start urgency of "For Real" and impart a bittersweet country shuffle to "A Stone", or when Jonathan Meiburg undercuts the bleak "Black" with a cheerily ascending keyboard melody that lets a beam of hope shine into Sheff's dark world. The result is one of the best rock biographies of the decade and a concept album that's all heart. --Stephen M. Deusner

173. HerbertBodily Functions
[K7; 2001]

Matthew Herbert's career has zigzagged between styles and approaches-- minimalist house tracks, lounge jazz, politically motivated musique concrète-- but Bodily Functions is the one album where all his tendencies come together. Recorded with his then-partner Dani Siciliano, the album continues Around the House's investigations into intimacy and identity both lyrically and literally, with much of the source material sampled from "bodily functions" like clacking teeth and brushing hair. But the music's too lush to feel pedantic, thanks in large part to Siciliano's delivery, which swings between defiance and vulnerability, and to arrangements that lean heavily on jazz piano and brushed drums. On the more uptempo cuts, classic deep house provides the blueprint for skippy, tidy rhythm tracks. That Herbert and Siciliano eventually parted ways, in retrospect, may not be surprising: an almost overwhelming melancholy beats at the album's heart-- a sadness so insurmountable it brings its own kind of peace. --Philip Sherburne

172. ConstantinesShine a Light
[Sub Pop; 2003]

Music writers get so swept up in classification, we might think a label like "Fugazi-meets-Springsteen" is more important than relating lyrics like "To hell with the mill sallow chorus/ Lift your body out of exile," or describing the brittle grooves and airplane-hangar roar behind the hoarse protests and prayers of Constantines singers Bryan Webb and Steven Lambke. The Cons' fury resists getting summarized or blurbed. So what of Fugazi's (or, sigh, Springsteen's) wide wake of influence, even in this decade? The Constantines deserve praise for holding to the romance and promise of earlier rock'n'roll while simultaneously deconstructing it, if only for the sake of discovering something. Whatever equation you want to throw at them, the breadth of expression on Shine a Light stuns: The ground covered between "Nighttime/Anytime (It's Alright)" to "On to You" includes feral, bruised, proud, frightened, and fully confident songs. --Jason Crock

At the end of the decade, lo-fi had become a fashionable option, a recording approach made less out of necessity than out of fashion. But there's a third path, and while making a record on a cassette tape in 2009 may be a stubborn and affected act, there is still allure and aesthetic purpose in giving music a grainy feel in spite of GarageBand. See government exhibit labeled the Go! Team, whose 2004 debut used less than ideal recording conditions to evoke documentary-filmstrip soundtracks, TV cop shows, and girl-group 45s. This nostalgia-fetish genre-quilting was nothing new post-Odelay, but Go! Team mastermind Ian Parton proved himself a basement bandleader with an ear for authenticity that didn't strangle him creatively-- switching mid-song from soft-focus flute-driven instrumental to turntablism breakdowns in "Get It Together" or blending 1960s Motown with 80s Bronx on "Ladyflash". --Rob Mitchum